The Idealist
by partlysunny
Summary: Silly boy. Love knows no reason. That's why realists choose not to believe in it/ Rose, Scorpius, and a difference of opinion.


**The Idealist**

There are only two types of people in the world: realists and idealists.

Scorpius Malfoy was an idealist. He was a dreamer, one of those kids with an overactive imagination and a bright future with excess light spilling into their present. He had great ideas and big plans. He was going to be something special.

Rose Weasley, on the other hand, was a realist. To her, there was no grey area in between black and white. She didn't dream because she saw no use for it, and her imagination was strictly limited to what she could accomplish with the potential at hand. She was going to be something… well, something else.

Now, if Scorpius had known any of this, then he would've been saved a hell of time and energy. But looking at her—_really_ looking at her for the first time—right now from across the great hall on the first day back for sixth year, he didn't know anything, except that Rose had matured quickly over the summer (he almost didn't recognize her), and that she looked very, very pretty in the candlelight.

#

Marcellus Zabini, a fellow idealist, told him to go for it.

"She's hot and available," Marc said one night in their dorm. "Why not?"

"Because she's a total bitch," Drew Nott (realist) called from his own bed across the room. "We've been through this at least a thousand times this week, Scor. Give it a rest, already."

"Who says she's a bitch?" Scorpius asked, glancing over at Drew.

Drew gave him the type of look usually reserved for very slow, very stupid people. "I worked on that Potions project thing in fifth year with her. We were partners for a whole term so I think I'd know if she's a bitch. I think I'm an authority here on this issue, okay? And that was before she became all hot. God only knows, she's probably gotten worse."

Scorpius mulled this over. He couldn't say he knew Rose—actually, it was safe to say that he didn't know anything about her at all, with the exception her parents of course (whom everyone knew). He had never really tried becoming friends with her. Well, he never had an incentive to.

It wasn't just that she was good looking. Scorpius was not so shallow. It was something else, something he couldn't see right now. Maybe if he got closer, he'd find out what it was?

He looked at Marc, who was waiting for him to say something. Drew had already tucked himself into bed, having voiced his opinion (and in his mind, the _only_ opinion).

"Why not?"Scorpius said.

"Jesus Christ," Drew groaned as Marc high fived Scorpius. "Here we go."

#

An idealist is a very optimistic person. They believe that, given the time, a solution will present itself, no matter how big the issue is. So even though it should have, it didn't really bother Scorpius that he had to wait until Halloween before he finally found a chance to talk, really talk, with Rose.

He found her standing on the railing of the Astronomy tower.

"Whoa," he said as soon as he recognized that long mane of red curls that all but glittered in the starlight. "Whatever it is, it's not worth it, I promise you."

She turned slowly, raising a pair of perfectly shaped brows at him. "Scorpius Malfoy," she said, sounding surprised. "What are you doing out here at this time of night?"

His heart was pounding a mile a minute, but he told himself silently that if she could remain that calm then so could he.

"I come out here when I need some quiet," he replied, sounding slightly breathless. "The Slytherins are having a Halloween party, you see."

"I do see," she said, and her chocolate brown eyes flashed up and down his person.

He followed her gaze and realized that he still had a bottle of butterbeer clutched in his hand. He had forgotten all about it.

"Just what kind of person climbs up from the _dungeons_ to the highest point in the castle—we're talking about twenty minutes of walking, here—for some quiet time when a _party_ is going on?" she asked, placing her hands on her hips, now standing on the railing with no support at all.

His heart gave a painful lurch. "If you come down from there, I'll tell you." When she didn't listen, just continued to watch him absently, he said, "It's not worth it, Rose."

Her eyes cut through him. "That's the second time you've said that. What do you mean?"

He chanced a step closer to her. She didn't do anything (like jump) so he took another.

"I mean, whatever's happening to make you feel like this will pass," he explained. "We're only sixteen. I guess it's hard sometimes to remember that we've got the rest of our lives ahead of us."

"I bet that's what you tell all the girls," she said with a soft chuckle.

"I've been meaning use it for a while, actually," he joked, earning a laugh that he decided right there was among the nicest things he had ever heard. "Just come down. It'll be okay, I promise."

"Now, why would you do that?" she asked, frowning. "Why would you promise something like that? You're not God, you don't control these things. You're not in any position to make a promise like that."

"You're right, I'm sorry," he said hastily, putting his hands up. "Please, just come down from there. Please."

She stared at him for a beat before shrugging. "Well, since you said please," she muttered, and she hopped off the railing onto the observation deck, and into a direct blast of moonlight.

He averted his gaze, because it was hard to look at her without losing his train of thought and he didn't want to look like an idiot now that he'd finally found a chance to make an impression on her.

She took a few steps closer to him and his senses were assaulted—nay, _battered_—by a wave of strawberries.

"You know," she said as she took the butterbeer out of his hand and tossed back a swig, "I wasn't going to jump. I just found the conversation fun and decided to play along."

Scorpius let out a breath he hadn't realized he had been holding. "Then what are you doing out here?"

She smiled, pressing the bottle into his hand, and she left the observation deck with a couple of parting words: "I come out here when I need some quiet."

Scorpius had to pinch himself about five times to assure himself that he wasn't dreaming.

#

The Astronomy tower became their unofficial meeting place. Scorpius stopped going for the quiet, braving the twenty minute walk and the danger of potentially being picked up by prefects on patrol at night for a little bit of time alone with Rose.

She didn't come every day but when she did, it was an adventure. One day, she made him count stars and they reached one thousand, two hundred and twenty-four before she fell asleep with her head on his shoulder. Another time, she said she wanted a dip in the lake to clear her mind. Once, she brought two broomsticks with her and taught him about 'Tag', a Muggle game she and he cousins had modified to be played in the air. Rose was wild, different, distinct in her talking and walking and acting and _thinking_. Rose was fun.

Then, one day (the fifteenth of December, he would remember if forever), she kissed him.

It was completely unexpected. He had opened the door to the observation deck, felt a tug on his collar, and suddenly she was kissing him.

He couldn't remember much of it now—it had been a blur of that strawberry scent and her fiery curls and her hot mouth and when it was over, she just laughed.

"Well?" she said, hands on her hips, an eyebrow raised and mirth twinkling in her eyes. "Aren't you going to ask me out?"

He supposed that was the day it started, his descent into madness.

But it was a very beautiful madness. There was no debating that.

#

"You asked her out?" Drew screamed at the top of his lungs back at the dorm that Saturday as Scorpius got dressed for his date with Rose (he still couldn't think the words 'date with Rose' without getting jitters).

"Drew, give him a break," Marc said, rolling his eyes. "Rose Weasley is hot. Be happy for him."

"Well, it's hard to be happy for him when he's minutes away from getting his heart ripped right out of your ass," Drew snapped. He grabbed Scorpius, who had been carefully combing his hair, by the shoulders and shook him roughly. "Scorpius, you still have a chance. Back out before it's too late. I'm serious, she's the bitch type."

Drew was a realist, remember, so he knew what he was talking about. But Scorpius didn't know that so he shrugged Drew's hands off him with a casual, "You worry too much" and continued combing his hair.

#

One date turned into two, two turned into three, three turned into four, and then Scorpius lost count of the days, track of the time, and himself in Rose Weasley.

Christmas came and went. He got her a music box that she could put her jewelry in, because she was always complaining about how she could never find a complete pair of earrings. She got him an empty leather-bound book and she didn't explain what it was until she saw him on the first day of term.

"It's not a diary," she said, rolling her eyes at him as they walked aimlessly through the castle at night. "It's just a book. Fill it up with your thoughts, Scor. Everything. Even the stupid stuff."

"That sounds like a diary," he pointed out. "I think keeping a diary takes out a lot of one's manliness. It's quite dangerous."

She laughed, shoving him playfully. "It's _not _a diary. You write all your thoughts in it and then, when you fill it all up, you go back and reread it. It's supposed to show you how your thoughts change during a set period of time. It's supposed to show you how much you've grown."

He considered this. "It still sounds like a diary to me."

She gave him an exasperated look.

"Okay, okay," he said, putting his hands up. "I'll do it."

She looked pleased. "Good."

"Do you have one?" he asked.

She nodded, keeping her eyes downcast, and said nothing more on the subject. Scorpius decided to drop it but it was never very far from his mind when he wanted something to think about.

#

Scorpius wrote in his not-diary a few times a week, when he remembered to. He didn't really know what to say, so he wrote a lot about Rose. That was a subject that seemed to have no end. If he didn't find something to write about soon, he'd need a new book.

#

Talking to Rose was very easy, he found. She always wanted to listen, and as he spoke, he realized that there was a lot more to talk about than he ever thought there was.

He talked about his family for the first time in a long time, about being damned before he was born because of his name, about society and how they looked down upon his kind, about his distant father and socialite mother, about spending his childhood filling the void his absent parents left with books.

When they were in talking moods, he did most of the talking. Then, one unseasonably warm March afternoon, lying in the grass by the lake, she started talking too.

"You have no idea what it's like having Hermione Granger as a mother," she muttered as he tossed pebbles into the water.

He ceased immediately. She had never spoken about her mother before.

"She was perfect when she was my age," she said quietly, tracing the shape of a cloud with her hand. "Perfect. She got good grades, she was a prefect, she never got into trouble, everyone _loved_ her, and on top of it all, she helped save the world as we know it." Her hand fell over her belly. It looked to him like a very defeated motion. "I'm expected to be just as perfect. Except that I'm not. I can never be half of what Hermione is."

She fell silent, staring up at the blue sky with a sardonic smile in place, but he thought he saw a tear glitter in her eye before she blinked it away.

"No one told you to be Hermione Granger," he told her after a few minutes of silence. "Just keep being Rose. You're perfect at that."

He'd wanted to say something more profound, something about how it okay, very good actually, that she wasn't Hermione, because all her flaws were what he liked most about her, but he couldn't. And it didn't matter anyway, because Rose's smile widened with his answer.

"Thank you, Scorpius," she told him, her eyes twinkling.

He guessed that was the moment he fell in love with her.

#

"Goddamn it, how the fuck did this happen?" Drew seethed.

"What's so wrong about it?" Marc asked. He clapped Scorpius on the back, smiling. "Congrats, man, that's awesome."

"Thanks, Marc—"

"No, this is _terrible_," Drew growled. He leapt to his feet. "You are not supposed to be in love with her. This was supposed to be _casual_. That way, when she dumps you, you won't care all that much. But now you've gone and let yourself fall in _love_…."

Scorpius exchanged a quick look with Marc.

"No, wipe that look off your face and listen to me," Drew said. "Think back, Scor. Just think. Do you really think she loves you back? Do you even think she could?"

"Of course, she could—" Scorpius began, but Drew shook his head and cut him off.

"Scorpius, Rose Weasley is the takes-no-prisoners type," he said impatiently. "That's the type that doesn't even believe in love."

Marc barked out a laugh. "What the hell, Drew? Love isn't something you have to believe in. It's there whether you like it or not."

The words of an idealist springing to life in the dorm so usually haunted by realist slurs. Drew stared at Marc like he had never seen him before.

"Marc," he said, "shut up. Scorpius," he added, turning to the only blonde in the room, "has Weasley given you any indication whatsoever that she could love you?"

Scorpius thought. Midnight kisses at the top of the Astronomy tower, quick dips in the lake in the dark, the way he poured his heart out to her whenever they just sat there and talked… didn't it stand to reason that she could love him as easily as he had come to love her?

Silly boy. Love knows no reason. That's why realists choose not to believe in it.

"Let me rephrase," Drew said when the silence stretched itself taut. "Have you ever talked to her on this issue?"

Scorpius shook his head. "No."

"Have you ever talked to her about your relationship at all?"

"N…no."

Drew leaned forward, an uncharacteristically sober look on his face. "Then, Scor, how can you know how she feels?"

Another silence followed, in which Scorpius looked at Drew and realized that he had no idea.

#

Being an idealist makes one a naturally curious person. So when Rose gave Scorpius her book bag to hold as she made a mad dash back to the common room to pick up a textbook in between classes one April morning, and he saw the edge of a leather-bound book peeking out of her bag,, he just couldn't help himself.

His first thought was that it was his not-diary, and that she had been sneaking it from his trunk somehow to keep tabs in him. But upon closer inspection, the binding looked more worn, the leather red-tinted, the book older than his own. This was Rose's not-diary.

He sat on a windowsill far off the beaten path on the third floor where she definitely wouldn't find him and flipped through it quickly before class. The first entry was dated at the beginning of last summer.

He didn't read them all, he didn't have that kind of time, but he caught the gist of it. She talked a lot about her family, all her cousins and uncles and aunts. She talked about school, she talked about her mother, she talked about her friends. She didn't bother much with the future, like Scorpius did. No, Rose was more focused on the present.

Then why wasn't Scorpius mentioned? He _was _a part of her present, wasn't he?

He spent the rest of his time before class searching each entry for a whisper of himself but found nothing, nothing at all.

#

"She made you write a diary?" Drew asked, incensed.

"It's not a diary, and that's not my point," Scorpius said, pausing in his pacing of the dorm to point a finger at Drew, who was lounging on his bed. "The point it, I'm not in hers."

Marc snorted. "And?"

"That's bad," Drew said. "Very bad. I told you, you were gonna get it with Weasley. You're _fucked_. And not in the good way, either."

"Okay, what the hell does it matter what she writes in her diary?" Marc asked, coming to sit by Drew.

Drew shook his head sadly. "You poor, daft soul," he said with a sigh. Scorpius decided to stop pacing and listen to this. "What a girl writes in her diary is important because everything in that book is important to her. If Scor isn't in the book, then he's not exactly on her priority list, is he?"

Silence. Scorpius suddenly felt light, as light as a feather, as though the smallest breeze could just blow him down, down, down—

"Jesus," he whispered, feeling, above all, confused. Just what was he, if not as high up on her priority list as she was on his? What was he to her?

A realist would have had the answers to these questions. But by now you must have seen for yourself that Scorpius was not a realist.

#

"Are you okay?"

May the first—he remembered it because he'd gone straight to his not-diary and written it down afterwards. That was the day everything changed.

Because he answered the question she'd been asking for days differently than he usually did.

"If I said no, what would you do?" he asked.

She rolled over onto her back on the blanket they had laid out on the observation deck. It was a clear night, perfect for stargazing.

"Hmm," she said, tapping her chin with her index finger. "I'd suggest that we figure out why you're not okay and try to set your mood to rights. It's been off for a while."

"Has it?" he asked, knowing the answer. Even he could see that he hadn't been quite okay since he'd talked to Drew and Marc about the not-diary.

"Do you wanna tell me what's wrong?" she said.

He turned on his side to watch her as she stared up at the sky, wondering, not for the first time, just what went on in that head of hers.

"I think I'm just a little confused," he told her.

"About what?"

He took a deep breath, feeling like he was about to jump off a cliff. "About… you, me… us. This whole thing. I don't know… I—we've never talked about it—"

"Well, of course not," she said quickly, shooting up into a sitting position like a bullet, somehow making sense of his gibberish. "Talking is a disease. If you talk enough about something, you'll ruin it."

He said nothing.

"You worry too much," she whispered, smoothing out the wrinkles on his furrowed brow. "Loosen up, S. Go with the flow."

But Scorpius didn't want to go with the flow. He wanted answers, he wanted assurance, he wanted to know if this fire in his chest, this tingly sensation in his stomach, the mad beating of his heart every time he locked eyes with her—he wanted to know if she felt it too.

He should've known he wouldn't get any answers from her, but he didn't.

"Don't talk," she whispered. "Don't think. Just be. Just be here with me right now. Can you do that?"

He swallowed down his worries and nodded. Yes, he could do that. Because she was Rose and when it came down to it, he would do whatever for her.

#

The main difference between a realist and an idealist is that an idealist loves to talk. And that Scorpius couldn't talk to Rose about their relationship (or whatever the hell this was) bothered him more than he could say.

All through May, the words that remained unsaid between them created a chasm that couldn't be filled in their every word, touch, kiss, everything. It was there when he kissed her good morning and goodnight. It was there when they played Tag on broomsticks. It was there even though he tried his damndest to ignore it.

It was there that morning as final exams neared, when she pulled him aside and told him that they shouldn't see each other anymore.

The words didn't fully sink in until about a minute later.

"What?" he said, feeling what was unmistakably fear bubbling deep inside him. "When did you—how—_why_, Rose?"

She shrugged. "I don't know. I just—well, I don't usually do this you know, date. I don't see the point in it, actually—" _Jesus Christ_, he thought as Drew's words rang true. "—but I thought I'd make an exception, you see, for you. Because I like you."

"You—like me?" he asked, his mouth falling open in shock. He subtly pinched himself, felt the sting, and added, "_What_?"

"I mean, the year's over," she went on. "Summer's coming. I don't really see why we should continue."

Time stopped. Scorpius was pretty sure his heart did too.

She patted his shoulder. "You're still one of my closest friends. I don't want that to change."

He nodded numbly, not really sure what else to do. He felt as though the rug was swiped from underneath him.

Rose was smiling gently, waiting for him to say something, to do something, anything.

"Yeah," he muttered. "Okay. Yeah."

She patted his shoulder again and walked past him, around the corner and out of sight. Scorpius watched her go until he couldn't see her anymore, then sunk down to the floor with his back against the wall and skived off Transfiguration. He skived off Defense Against the Dark Arts too.

He stayed in that deserted corridor for hours that passed like minutes until Drew and Marc found him and dragged him back to their dorm.

#

He spent June in denial, July in pieces, and August in a grim determination of fix everything inside him that he let break.

He started with the not-diary.

"Are you sure you should be reading that?" Marc asked one lazy summer afternoon at Malfoy Manor.

Scorpius turned the leather-bound book in his hands, vividly recalling the moment he received it by owl post on Christmas morning, a lifetime ago. The memory forced his eyes closed.

"I'm sure," he said, and he started reading.

Every page was about Rose, in the beginning. He'd talked at length about her, about their future, about how he'd tell his father he was seeing the daughter of two people he had hated in school (thank God he hadn't, and now wouldn't).

Scorpius quickly skipped to the middle Here, there were less mentions of Rose, more mentions of his future, of his hopes of making Head Boy next year, of wondering what to do with himself after he graduated.

The further into the not-diary he read, the more he realized that Rose had been right. He could see himself growing up through the entries in his quick, messy scrawl. The puppy love faded into normal, everyday acceptance of their relationship as the pages passed. Rose had come suddenly into his life, with the appearance of the book and the stories of her he filled the beginning of it with. She had become a part of his life, as the dates at the top of the page changed and the stories of her lessened, making room for other subjects. And then she dropped out of the book altogether, without any dramatics or fanfare. One page had mentions of her. The next, and all those that came after that day at the end of May, had none.

He decided it made sense, in a way. She had come careening into him without warning, and then just as suddenly, she left. But he was living, just has he had been before Rose. And that was how life would carry on, without her.

He put the book at the very bottom of the trunk, where he'd soon forget it—he didn't need it anymore, it had fulfilled its purpose—and turned to Marc, feeling decidedly different.

"You okay, bro?" Marc asked warily.

Scorpius nodded. Strangely, he did feel okay. As though he had purged himself of… something.

"I'm good," he said. "I'm good."

#

Above all, an idealist is a maybe person. There is a yes and no, of course, they are not that whimsical. But behind every no is a maybe, and behind every yes is a maybe too.

Scorpius lived life on the fringe, that grey area between yes and no, the one that Marc frequented and Drew insisted didn't exist. And he'd stay there, neither yes nor no, whenever someone asked him how he was or how he'd be. Eventually he'd have to crawl into yes. Eventually, but not now. Right now, he'd stay there, figure things out, and come out when he was good and ready, maybe even better.

He was an idealist, after all. And idealists had a lot going for them.

So he'd be okay. Yeah, he'd be okay.

**-FIN-**

**A/N: This fic was written in response to the Song of the Day Challenge over at the NGF forums for the day of July 22, 2011. **


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